[Fhsst-authors] Re: Free textbooks license

[Sam Halliday]

Ben Crowell wrote:
> >if we want to include any material in our book, we will have to convert it to
> >LaTeX... even the figures. so anything you give us will meet the
> >`transparent' criteria of the GFDL.
> 
> >also, we are the only authors of our book, and we can release branches of it
> >under whatever license we wish, at any time... so we can give you CC/by-sa
> >licensed versions if you so wish.
> This sounds pretty reasonable. It sounds like dual licensing of the entire
> books isn't what you want, and isn't possible for me, but this kind of
> piecemeal licensing would work fine. From my own selfish point of view,
> the main thing that I'd like to get from other people for inclusion in my
> books would just be more homework problems and/or worked examples. From
> a quick look at your book, it looks like you do have some worked examples,
> some of which might be useful to me, and which I might therefore want to
> request CC/by-sa licensing for. In such cases, I'd make sure to add a note in
> brackets saying "[example by Mark Horner]" or "[problem by Sam Halliday]", and
> I'd add a note in the back of the book saying that materials from Mark Horner
> or Sam Halliday were licensed to me under the CC/by-sa.
> (I guess the bylines might even be legally required, since you'd be licensing
> it to me under the CC license with the "by" bit turned on.)

i don't think we have any problem with that at all. unfortunately... you are
forced (by your license) to credit our work... but i don't think we really care
about how great a deal is made of it. just do whatever is necessary to satisfy
your license.

> I'd be happy to license specific stuff out of my books to you under the
> GFDL as well, provided you give the appropriate credit in the spirit of
> CC/by, and let me know what specific things you want licensed to you. 

excellent! we will certainly credit you... at the moment our CREDIT and book
inclusions of credits is very basic. there is a spreadsheet file floating around
somewhere with details of what everyone has done... we'll use that information
to make a much better CREDITS section nearer a first launch.

> We can figure out whether there are any technical things I need to do on
> my end to make it easier, such as exporting line art from Illustrator into
> open formats. (What drawing software are you using?)

actually we use pstricks (a LaTeX adon) to do our drawings. if a diagram is too
complicated to be converted, we would require EPS for inclusion in the LaTeX

> I can also make sure
> that stuff you use is actually mine to license -- if you check out the
> photo credits in the back of each book, you'll see that some of it is
> stuff that other people gave me permission to use, some is used under
> licenses from other people (e.g., the old PSSC photos), and in a few
> cases I'm claiming fair use; although I've tried to be careful about listing
> everything correctly in the photo credits, I'd like to check this kind of
> thing on a case-by-case basis to make sure I didn't forget to list it.

yeah... that would be great. all that stuff falls under the "invariant sections"
part of the GFDL... which is why GNU made such an effort to include that
invariant stuff (documentation and books being necessarily differnet from
software). but we do not wish to have any invariant sections... thereby having
the truley free version of the GFDL

on a phylisophical note... i was surprised that stallman wanted the "invariant"
stuff included in his book license... backtracking to software, it is
essentially the same as saying that free software may have non-free data files
included. i don't think he would agree with that concept so much :-) for
example... it means he should agree with the concept of companies giving
binaries away for free (on the GPL), but requiring commerical data files (such
as images/maps) to run. a bit like the id software games doom and quake.
anyway... just a thought! he was actually here in edinburgh a few weeks ago... i
regret not askign him his opinions on that little issue.

cheers,
Sam
-- 
Free High School Science Texts
  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fhsst
Sam's Homepages
  http://fommil.homeunix.org/~samuel
  http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~samuel

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